Amer Rust

Years in the graphic arts and metal transformation fields have provided a rich and valuable background experience for Amer, now wholly dedicated to expressing concepts in a more purely creative form. Through a lengthy process of exploration and experimentation, Amer has worked to develop and refine his distinctive technique of rust painting on steel, creating works featuring organic textures and warm earth colors. Due to the highly unpredictable nature of the chemical and physical elements he combines, Amer's art is a collaboration directed by man, yet always determined by nature. Thus begins a transformation where the deterioration of the material is transmuted by the artist into a creative process. The iron oxides forming on the steel surfaces evoke many of humankind's earliest expressions with its reddish-orange pigments essentially identical in its chemical composition to those our ancestors used to create their cavern paintings. Through its interactive reactions, oxidation frequently forms organic patterns that echo the propagation of life at a microscopic scale as well as geological phenomenons similar to those on Earth or other planets, when viewed from space. The infinitely small and the infinitely large seems to meet in Amer's art.